If you have recorded evidence of him saying he'll come after you, then i don't see why you can't post that up as well. You think he'd be dumb enough to actually come after you, with actual evidence of him saying he'd do so that you could easily show the police? Actually from the sound of it he might be...but ya lol.

Let this story be a lesson to all those who date their instructors, it's usually bad news waiting to happen.

I knew better than to. That's the worst part. Lord knows I've seen it happen, we both agreed to be professional when it came to the gym.

And he has no odea I saved them and he would come after me, yes. I am looking for legal action

I've actually been to only one club in my life (soon to be two, though). I had paid up-front for a month of _ing __un, and after careful consideration, I actually never went. Then I decided to try out judo, at the time there was only one dojo I could reach easily so the decision was easy.

For the first year it was awesome. We did the usual drilling, situation sparring, full sparring. In the second year randori was actually made optional. During randori time the class would split and those that wanted to do more drills had half the room and those who wanted to randori had half.

We were 10 to want to randori. Then 6. Then 4. Then 1.

Seeing that, the coach tried to have a randori day, perhaps to spark some interest. He asked that only orange belts and up come. Welp that plan was foiled when I and a couple colored belt showed up to finally do some throwin' but were met with a huge contingent of white belts. We got more drilling for our efforts.

By the third year the classes were almost completely dead. Yeah, I know. Dead judo. What the hell? I don't think the classes were dead because the coach wanted them to. There were simply too much people. We couldn't even train sutemi because we risked throwing somebody onto one of the ubiquitous white belts, so randori was out of the question. We'd usually do randori in the last two weeks of every "semester", when most of the nooblets had dropped out and we had some breathing space.

Two weeks per year of randori? I did not sign up for this. I don't dislike drills, they are important building blocks, but come on!

Third year was already going pretty bad and I thought of quitting right there and then. The decision was finally removed from my grasp when I was the unlucky uke to the most incompetent kata-guruma I've ever seen. Tori overspun me when dropping my ass and I landed on the point of my shoulder. I've probably done hundreds of kata-guruma falls because it was my weak technique and we mostly trained give-and-take. I've never seen someone flunk it so bad. Anyway, the result was a broken collarbone.

Sitting on the bench in plainclothes with a sling while others go at it is not my idea of fun.

Queue some time later. It breaks again on my first day. I don't even remember to what, probably some stupid crap, might even have been my fault (before y'all get on my ass, yes I was cleared to go, yes I know how to fall). Whole batch of fresh new white belts look on as I improvise a sling with my t-shirt and head home. Probably was a bad business year for the dojo, that third one.

Fourth year. It's funny because we actually did some randori but it was still few and far between. Coach seemed happy to have me back, even set me up as the official nage-no-kata uke for his son's shodan grading, since ironically, according to the coach I had "great ukemi". Plans foiled again, collarbone broke once more. Same guy as the first time (I tried to avoid him, but this time it was that or sit out, so I took the gamble and lost). This time he loaded me on his left shoulder (!!) doing a right-side seoi-nage. I think. I'm not sure, I just know I flew at a weird angle and I had no time to readjust or tell him to stop his crap. I overspun and fell on the point of my shoulder again.

I just couldn't understand anymore. I had gotten failed at tests because my technique wasn't up to snuff. This guy was my rank (nikyu at the time) and still could not do ippon-seoi-nage semi-correctly. The obvious conclusion : laxed standards. Kyu grades are left completely at the coach's discretion. I was beginning to worry about my ass too, but visits from judoka belonging to other clubs and visiting other clubs myself defused that feeling, since I could hang with outsiders, pretty well if I do say so myself.

Two collarbone breaks had their effect on my first year of university. My grades dropped, and I lost my sense of direction career-wise. I then got accepted to law school (not a graduate program here), probably based on my high school/technical college grades because my university ones just weren't very good. I decided that further breaks would just hamper this whole new career choice, so I had to get a safer club.

But I did come back a little. It was winter and I had nothing to do. The coach tried to push me into kata competitions to earn my points for shodan. I told him repeatedly I wanted to compete, but not in kata! I suppose that was somewhat creative on his part. Kata is less physically rigorous than shiai and it's still competing. It would have been a decent suggestion, I have nothing in particular against kata and those that like doing kata, but it's just not what I wanted to do! But still, the one or two times it was randori time (for 6 months), I did not do randori, I did nage-no-kata. *sigh*

Let's recapitulate : laxed standards, dangerously inept members (note : the old timers were actually of a very good standard) and dead judo. Yeah. I left.

So I decided I had to join another club. The university has one so I inquired. I plan on attending it this fall. They said it was possible for me to get prepared to compete, so I'm pretty excited to finally do some randori again.

Ya know I love MA in general even the stupid **** is good for a laugh like point fighting witch is complete bullshit and I am a Shotokan guy but I do do a lot of training with a old school goju guy. Point is we look for self defense and to be Teh Death On the STREET but ya know the only way to really do is to just get a gun and go to the firing range, as my father -in-law says nothing beats a bullet lol.

Last night I decided not to show up anymore at my Shotokan dojo. Archaic 1 step kumite drills and knowing that I'll have to wait 2 more years for light point sparring threw me off. Its a shame really cuz I really liked the art. Too bad its taught by people who have no interest in fighting.

I left a no-gi BJJ school for a variety of reasons, but primarily because the instructor had no real interest in instructing new students (me) but remained busy with his fighters and promoting fights (he helped run a local MMA promotion). That and repeatedly being injured by people who muscled submissions during drills and I lost interests. The plethora of teenage blue belts who had no interest in helping a beginner develop skills and every intention of tapping me no matter the cost, and I was done.

Thankfully I found a Judo club that was great, and I was very sad to leave when I moved to a different state.

Not to necro an old thread but found some of the stuff here fairly interesting and felt like adding my own story to the mix. I used to go to a place where they did TKD, MMA, Kickboxing and Iaido.

I did the TKD often and quickly graded to yellow belt. The place when I started going was a pretty good gym, the main fellow never teached he was often minding the desk so the assistant instructor did most of the training. The instruction was pretty good, good fun, fairly practical considering what I'd heard about TKD, mostly sparring and full contact with minimum padding, shin pads, head gear, gloves and stuff. Then things started to go down hill after they got a fellow in to teach a class, like a seminar type deal. Telling us that we shouldn't worry about power, just throw them fast cause they score more points.

Then sparring got lighter to none existent (with some of the main instructors saying that sparring just distracts from the Pumsee's). We were asked to donate to the gym to help put towards a ring, think they had just under £2000 by the end of it. The ring came and it was one of those economical rings that sit on the floor, barely 2 meters square of space in it. We were also told that we weren't allowed to use outside equipment only stuff bought inside the gym up to and including water. No outside bottles, had to be bought from the vending machine. Cause that all supports the gym...

Then the place turned to patterns, we were told we weren't allowed to train anywhere else out side of this gym (yeah right, I'll train where I fucking want) some students were threatened with the door cause the grandmaster found out they'd been training MMA at another gym on different days and it was disrespectful.

The kickboxing there was okay there for a while. Was sort of a hybrid of TKD and Kickboxing which I thought was quite cool, though full of patterns. We sparred more often than we did in TKD. Though it was all semi contact stuff and after a few weeks, they fetched in a new rule that we couldn't actually punch to the face, only back fists and reverse back fists, no spinning back fists...

The MMA I tried for a single lesson. The guy teaching it was a big fat fucker. Had no idea what he was doing. Kept coming to me to show people cause I had a little bit of Muay Thai experience... Though threatened me with the door when I tried to show a student a move cause it wasn't right and he was teaching the gym... even though he'd asked me to demonstrate that move a few minutes ago... I easily tapped the other students with stuff I'd learned with probably a few weeks of BJJ I'd learned 2/3 years prior in a BJJ gym in Sheffield. Then it came to sparring we all had a go at one another. Faired okay at the stand up against the rest of them though most were more interested in taking me down to the floor where I easily tapped them.

Then the big fat fucker who ran the mma class steps in to spar, tells me that it's light sparring, no kicks to the head (okay) so we touched gloves, he sucker punched me square in the jaw, I moved to use my fairly shite boxing skills, then manage to land a blow or two before he kicked me square in the face (something he'd told me that we weren't allowed to do) which rocked me. He then shoved me in the corner and hammered me with blows until he winded me, I dropped. He then cheered himself on as if he'd just won an actual fight...

That was my first day at his MMA class btw. Cheered himself on for cheap shotting and dropping someone half his size on his first day at the class. Then after said he'd line me up for my blue belt in Jui Jitsu cause of my ground skill (my one week of BJJ skill from 3 years before I trained there)

Yeah I had already had enough of the place. I had a few more days left before my membership ran out and thought I'd stick it out. Then I stepped into the TKD class to see a 12 year old teaching adults pumsee.... No thanks. Walked out, not looked back.

Seen some of the former members of that gym that I got along well with. Apparently they didn't stick around for much longer as it apparently got even worse.

On the up side, the Iaido stuff was good there, knew what they were doing but they weren't too much to do with the rest of the gym. Just rented a space there. Enjoyed that while it lasted.

My first MA experience was Aikido. I was a chunky 15 year old computer nerd, and I wanted to learn to defend myself. Someone managed to convince my mother that Aikido was the "thinking man's martial art" and she insisted that I take it. At first I enjoyed the class, but after several months I still felt like I had yet to learn anything practical, so I decided to ask the instructor (a sixth dan) and techniques for defending against punches and kicks. He muttered something about me understanding how to actually defend myself once I understood the underlying mechanics of aikido. During class that day he then had us do a really dumb drill that involved defending against a kick while kneeling. After class that day he then gave one of the most passive-aggressive speeches in history, where he went on about respect, not asking to many questions, and why trying to understand how to actually fight makes you a bad person.

I didn't show up for awhile after that, but a few weeks later I did go back for one more class where I spent most of the times getting yelled at even though I was following his directions to the letter. After that I just quit. No fanfare, no explanation, no nothing. I just let my membership lapse, and never returned.

More than three years later I decided that I needed to make a change in my life and found a good MT gym. I also started attending the BJJ class there, and doing some Judo on Friday's after school with my English teacher. I'm pretty happy now.

My McDojo's "Point of No Return"

I apologize for your aikido experience. We had a new student, who is a sherif deputy, ask that question in his second class. My teachers response was to spend most of the aikido class free sparring. It was a good class, but our teacher is super laid back, and let's us train however we want.

There is definitely a lot of passive aggressiveness and arrogance in the aikido world.

I apologize for your aikido experience. We had a new student, who is a sherif deputy, ask that question in his second class. My teachers response was to spend most of the aikido class free sparring. It was a good class, but our teacher is super laid back, and let's us train however we want.

There is definitely a lot of passive aggressiveness and arrogance in the aikido world.

Yeah. Part of what made me think there was better aikido out there (and made me leave that dojo) was spending a few days doing it with the previously mentioned English teacher. In addition to his Judo BB and some middle rank in Shotokan, he also has a third degree BB in aikido, which he got during his time in japan during the late 60s/early 70s. I have nothing but respect for that man. He's in his early sixties, and he is still incredibly fast.